NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has taken strong objection to Iranian President Ali Rafsanjani’s remarks describing the Kashmir issue as an Islamic problem and blamed the Indian Government for failing to plead its case properly at the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) summit.
In a statement and a press conference, party Vice-President Krishan Lal Sharma demanded that India “review” its entire Pakistan policy “before it is too late” and give out “a clear signal to Pakistan, Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, the militants in Jammu and Kashmir and to the world as a whole that India means business on the Kashmir issue and it will not tolerate any interference in its internal matters from any country,”
He pointed out that the “blow hot and blow cold game” and the contradictory statements of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and other leaders were making the government “a laughing stock in the world.”
According to Sharma, “for reasons best known to him,” Rao “is still inclined to continue a dialogue” with Pakistan even though the Government was “quite convinced” that Pakistan was behind the misadventure to the move to cross the line of control on October 24,1992.
It should be the Prime Minister’s first and foremost duty, he said, to brief all political parties about the deliberations at Jakarta and the happenings in Jammu and Kashmir, he said.
He reiterated that Kashmir was an integral part of India and the issue was to be sorted out by the two countries, under the Shimla agreement. Any attempt by Pakistan to raise it on any international forum will violate the spirit of the agreement while any effort by any other NAM country “to indulge” in this matter will be a direct interference in India’s internal matters and a violation of the NAM spirit, he said.
Sharma also demanded that elections to municipal bodies be brought under the purview of the Election Commission. His demand came in the context of the recent municipal polls in Punjab.
In a letter to Information and Broadcasting Minister Ajit Panja, the BJP leader cited two fresh examples of the discriminatory role of the electronic media. In the first, while it carried Congress appreciation of India’s role at the NAM summit, it failed to mention the BJP criticism of the Prime Minister’s dialogue with the Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Secondly, it highlighted the Congress claims of success in the municipal elections while blacking out the BJP version, “It was a campaign of disinformation and misinformation.”
Article extracted from this publication >> September 25, 1992
